The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, has announced that about 100,000 volumes from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library have been digitised. The Library is being made publically accessible as part of a partnership between Google, the University of California and the UC San Diego Libraries. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library claims to be the world's largest oceanography library.
In 2008, UC San Diego became the first Southern California University to partner with Google in its efforts to digitise the holdings of the world's prominent libraries. Since then, about 300,000 volumes and other materials have been digitised from UCSD's International Relations & Pacific Studies Library, the East Asian Language Collection and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library. The University of California was an early partner with Google, joining the Google Book Search Project in 2006 and agreeing to provide several million books from UC libraries for digitisation. To date, more than 2 million books from UC libraries have been digitised.
According to Peter Brueggeman, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library, the materials digitised by Google include a wealth of books and journals, as well as numerous scientific expedition reports. The Scripps Library's collections cover subjects ranging from oceanography, marine biology, marine geology, marine technology, climate science and geophysics, with extensive resources in ecology, zoology, fisheries and seismology. The digitised materials also include numerous research expedition reports documenting scientific observations and discoveries dating back to the 1800s.
The Google project is helping UC San Diego and other university libraries to create digital access to thousands of texts and scholarly materials. Consequently, this helps to protect and preserve library collections for future generations and from catastrophic loss such as an earthquake or fire. As part of the agreement with Google, the University of California is receiving digital copies of all books and other materials scanned from the UC libraries. The university's copies are stored in HathiTrust, a shared digital repository developed in partnership with other major research institutions across the country.
The digitised books from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library and other materials from the UCSD Libraries are accessible via the Google Book Search Index. The search engine allows anyone to search the full text of books from libraries and publishing partners. For books in the public domain, readers will be able to view, browse and read the full texts online. For books protected by copyright, users can access basic background (such as the book's title and the author's name), a few lines of text related to their search and information about where they can borrow or buy a book.
Since the Google Book Search Project's inception in 2004, Google has digitised more than 12 million books from libraries and publishing partners throughout the world. In addition to the University of California, other libraries at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University and Oxford University are among those that have also partnered with Google. Google's ultimate goal with the project is to make all of the knowledge contained within the world's books searchable and discoverable online.
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